Blog description.

Accentuating the Liberal in Classical Liberal: Advocating Ascendency of the Individual & a Politick & Literature to Fight the Rise & Rise of the Tax Surveillance State. 'Illigitum non carborundum'.

Liberty and freedom are two proud words that have been executed from the political lexicon: they were frog marched and stood before a wall of blank minds, then forcibly blindfolded, and shot, with the whimpering staccato of ‘equality’ and ‘fairness’ resounding over and over. And not only did this atrocity go unreported by journalists in the mainstream media, they were in the firing squad.

The premise of this blog is simple: the Soviets thought they had equality, and welfare from cradle to grave, until the illusory free lunch of redistribution took its inevitable course, and cost them everything they had. First to go was their privacy, after that their freedom, then on being ground down to an equality of poverty only, for many of them their lives as they tried to escape a life behind the Iron Curtain. In the state-enforced common good, was found only slavery to the prison of each other's mind; instead of the caring state, they had imposed the surveillance state to keep them in line. So why are we accumulating a national debt to build the slave state again in the West? Where is the contrarian, uncomfortable literature to put the state experiment finally to rest?

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Monday, September 24, 2012

Privacy: Kim Dotcom and New Zealand's GCSB

So
as part of the ‘fiasco of officials’ that has been the Dotcom raid and its
aftermath, we now find that New Zealand’s central intelligence agency, the Government
Communications Security Bureau, has mucked up its part in the raid also, in
what must be a perfect fail mark for the State now, with every government
department involved having overridden its powers; itself an admittance of the
semi-police state we live under. But for me, there is something all the
reportage on this is so far missing. As stated in the NBR piece:

GCSB had acted unlawfully while
assisting the Police to locate certain individuals subject to arrest warrants
issued in the case. The Bureau had acquired communications in some instances
without statutory authority.

I
thought we had separation of powers for a reason. I don’t know what the
limitations on the GCSB are, but I just assumed their jurisdiction only
concerned matters of national security, such as foreign terror risk, a function which I’m
quite comfortable with. But do I take from this that police can routinely use
the frightening privacy busting powers of GCSB to augment their own powers,
once exceeded, to prosecute routine 'domestic' criminal cases: copyright, theft, drugs,
etc? And what other departments can do this also? IRD already have more powers
of snooping, search and seizure than the police, so I assume they’re linked in
to GCSB as well?

I
support IP, and so if Dotcom is found to have breached same, then that is a
legitimate matter for state sanction, but damn I’m fed up with government departments
that already have police state powers - when viewed against the civilised
classical liberal society - casually ignoring even those few boundaries they
have, and thumbing their nose at process in a way you or I as individuals would
be crucified over. And it's easy to fall into the assumption that it's only Dotcom's notoriety, in this instance, that has brought to light what is routine behaviour occurring here, and the inferences that has for whether we have the rule of law, or not, in New Zealand.

[Listening to a snippet on National Radio, that news broadcast ran that the problem was they were spying on New Zealand nationals and they aren't allowed to do that. If Wiki is to be believed, that would seem to be in line with their governing purpose ... but, the question remains: are they spying on other New Zealand nationals? What linkages do other government departments have with them?]

Civilisation is a movement toward privacy, an Orwellian surveillance state the opposite, and tax legislation, especially tax administration, has become the legislation and administration of surveillance and authoritarian rule, in contravention of the rule of law, and common decency. IR

If the Founding Fathers could see how freedom is bound, again, under the iron fist of our taxing authorities; New Zealand's IRD, America's IRS, UK's HMRC, a secret police operating in every country, there would be a Western Spring.

This blog is the only form my protest can take, hoping not to become a squashed blug on the windscreen of state.

Disclaimer: If you pay anything other than the correct amount of tax - as hard as that can be to calculate under our mess of tax law - then you're a bloody idiot. The IR's are all-powerful: they are not a construct of a free, voluntary, civilised classical liberalism, they are a relic of totalitarianism. You have no liberty or privacy from the IR's, you have no legal defence against them, you cannot refuse to be interrogated, you cannot question their actions or seek judicial review holding them to account, even the burden of proof has been turned against the taxpayer; before the law, though you have done nothing wrong, you have less rights than a murderer or rapist, and this Department has been charged by the Fortress of Legislation to systematically eavesdrop and investigate all of us. Don't mess with them. And let me put on record, the IRD staffers I deal with daily are ‘good’ people, I have no complaint whatsoever on a personal/personable level; but this blog is about the principles involved, and it remains my hope there is enough of a classical liberal ethic left, admitting debate and ' difference', that this blog is taken only for the contained - to these pages - protest that it is. For let me spell it out - you, Big Brother State, have won: I.Am.Scared.Of.You.You bet I am. But there's this loon in me that can't seem to shut up. (You're lucky, my poor wife has to live with it).

Copyright

All posts copyright Mark Hubbard and Life Behind the IRon Drape. Contents may be reproduced without permission provided credit is given to the author, it is not altered in any way, the context is made clear and a link is provided to the original.